Nabil Imam

Abdelrahman Sharafeldin, Nabil Imam, Hannah Choi

We present an end-to-end procedure for embodied exploration inspired by two biological computations: predictive coding and uncertainty minimization. The procedure can be applied to exploration settings in a task-independent and intrinsically driven manner. We first demonstrate our approach in a maze navigation task and show that it can discover the underlying transition distributions and spatial features of the environment. Second, we apply our model to a more complex active vision task, where an agent actively samples its visual environment to gather information. We show that our model builds unsupervised representations through exploration that allow it to efficiently categorize visual scenes. We further show that using these representations for downstream classification leads to superior data efficiency and learning speed compared to other baselines while maintaining lower parameter complexity. Finally, the modularity of our model allows us to probe its internal mechanisms and analyze the interaction between perception and action during exploration.

E. Paxon Frady, Garrick Orchard, David Florey et al.

Neuromorphic computing applies insights from neuroscience to uncover innovations in computing technology. In the brain, billions of interconnected neurons perform rapid computations at extremely low energy levels by leveraging properties that are foreign to conventional computing systems, such as temporal spiking codes and finely parallelized processing units integrating both memory and computation. Here, we showcase the Pohoiki Springs neuromorphic system, a mesh of 768 interconnected Loihi chips that collectively implement 100 million spiking neurons in silicon. We demonstrate a scalable approximate k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm for searching large databases that exploits neuromorphic principles. Compared to state-of-the-art conventional CPU-based implementations, we achieve superior latency, index build time, and energy efficiency when evaluated on several standard datasets containing over 1 million high-dimensional patterns. Further, the system supports adding new data points to the indexed database online in O(1) time unlike all but brute force conventional k-NN implementations.

Nabil Imam, Thomas A. Cleland

We present a neural algorithm for the rapid online learning and identification of odorant samples under noise, based on the architecture of the mammalian olfactory bulb and implemented on the Intel Loihi neuromorphic system. As with biological olfaction, the spike timing-based algorithm utilizes distributed, event-driven computations and rapid (one-shot) online learning. Spike timing-dependent plasticity rules operate iteratively over sequential gamma-frequency packets to construct odor representations from the activity of chemosensor arrays mounted in a wind tunnel. Learned odorants then are reliably identified despite strong destructive interference. Noise resistance is further enhanced by neuromodulation and contextual priming. Lifelong learning capabilities are enabled by adult neurogenesis. The algorithm is applicable to any signal identification problem in which high-dimensional signals are embedded in unknown backgrounds.